Jun 06, 2013

First, I love this question and the opportunity to address it in this happy space. It's sticky. A surface answer might be: Pinterest! Tumblr! Instagram! Magazines! Design books! And those resources have their place, certainly. In fact, I go to them on a nearly daily basis.

But if you really want to get into the nitty gritty about "inspiration hunting," things suddenly get a little more serious, as this is the constant subject of debate in the design world. After all, how does one draw the line between "inspiration" and "emulation" or "imitation" or "homage"? What is original anymore, or rather — is originality even important? I'd like to think so. Life would be pretty boring otherwise. (Unless you're Andy Warhol, and then you totally got away with it. But he was an original in being an unoriginal… so yeah.)

To be clear, I think imitation has its place. "Repeat after me" is a viable method of teaching and learning. It's a survivalist method of exploration — practice through the process of versioning. Likewise, art education teaches us to copy.

On a professional level, imitation gets tricky (as it should) and raises some debate over ownership of ideas. If you are looking at what someone else is doing and decide to adapt their existing work for your own purposes or your own content, then is the final result really yours, or does it belong to the person whose ideas inspired you? Do you credit that person as "inspiration" or are you just flat-out copying? I'm not sure. But this conflict can make the blogosphere a not so fun environment sometimes because (let's be real) copying happens all the freaking time. Peronally, it makes my heart sink to see it happen. (We are a much smaller community than you think. We notice.)

So, here's my advice on inspiration hunting. Tread lightly, and think critically. Pretty things are easy to find and duplicate. Key word: easy, which usually means the end product isn't all that inspiring. When you're hunting, don't just look for pretty things. It usually leads to unoriginal (but admittedly functional) work — the "chic banal" as Zac Posen says on Project Runway...

No, pretty is not enough. Look behind the pretty. Ask yourself why or how did that person come up with that idea? Why does that work? Break it down. Dissect the ideas. It will help you not to piggyback on someone else's ideas, but to instead appreciate their process as a manner of inspiring your own. Rinse and repeat. The practice of making observations and asking questions has the power to help you uncover the opportunities and needs that can lead to great design work.

When they say curiosity goes hand-in-hand with creativity, this is exactly why. For a creative person, inspiration-hunting is not so much an activity as it is a learned manner of thinking about everything around at all times. This helps to find space for something new — wiggle room in the universe, if you will. When I'm designing, I look for a need, and try to find interesting ways to address that need through what I'm designing, be it a blog post or a column idea, a logo or a website for someone else. For example, every single piece of Note to Self content, from this very Advice column to Words for the Week, to The Print Shop to Hers/Mine was thought of with you and our needs as consumers of information in mind. Need is inspiring.

Was that too much? I hope not. After all, design is really problem solving. It's meant to be sticky and challenging and mind-bending... No one is perfect and imitative mistakes happen, but as long as we recognize that it's part of the journey of learning a skill or stretching a talent, I think that's the most important thing. Comments section, let 'er rip!

Mar 11, 2013

(Trying to be a little less teachery and more personal today.) How did I know I wanted to be a graphic designer? It was certainly not smooth sailing, that’s for sure. It still isn't. I'm still figuring out exactly what I want. I think most of my internal battle has to do with my history of listening to everyone else but myself for far, far too long...

I’ve always been interested in art. My grandmother loved to draw and dabble in crafts and interior decorating. My aunt is a wonderful painter. My dad is a designer and a great businessman. Both of my parents love traveling, art and history. It clearly rubbed off on me... So I guess I can blame (thank) them. Along with my art history major track in college, I took as many studio classes as possible and sketched or painted habitually (I still have an easel in my house and paint from time to time!) I took a very basic “digital art” class (aka Photoshop 101) as a senior in 2007. After graduation when I was working in an art gallery, I pinched my pennies to buy a new desktop Mac and Adobe Creative Suite and got to work teaching myself how to use everything. (I still learn new tricks from other designers at work every day. You can never learn it all...)

As for what graphic design is like to study, I can honestly say that it is not for the faint of heart. You have to really, really love it, almost to the point of obsession. The feedback can be brutal, the professors and other students subjective or clouded in ego... Oy. Some nights were endless and the class materials bankrupting (Printers! Printing fees! Paper! Software! Tablets! Xacto blades! Laser cutting! Mounting! Spray adhesive! Goof Off to unstick your hands from each other! The list goes on and on...) In the end, I found that studying graphic design was not at all meant for me. In fact, it nearly broke me. There’s some brutal honesty for you.

From that experience, I was literally driven into the arms of what I really needed to be doing. I found it in SCAD's Design Management degree program, which approaches business from a designer’s perspective and vise-versa. And even though many of those classes were brutal and the all-nighters equally plentiful, it was thrilling and exhausting and mind-bending and frustrating and wonderful all at the same time — sort of like what I imagine marriage must be like... Ha!

Anyway, that program mixed with blogging on the side helped me bridge the gap between my love for hands-on approach to problem-solving (design) and the strategic thinking DMGT taught me. My current job is just an extension of this happy occupational marriage, and I’m really loving it. Never in a million years would I have expected my life or my career to turn out this way. Suffice it to say: You’ll know your field when you find it. I wish I had a better answer than that.

I will say this: Something about being a young adult makes people want to tell you that it’s not possible to be an artist or to take a route where your job depends entirely on “making things.” I graduated and took a desk job that I hated, found myself turning to “making things” in my free time, and in the end it’s what I do for a living anyway. So take that, naysayers! Thanks for the legwork, universe. My advice here is simple: if it feels right, it's right. We’re on the path to awesome.

Any design students (former or current) out there want to share their wisdom?

Mar 04, 2013

And we're back. Same question, more answers! Last week, we talked about the importance of building a brand that makes sense for you by using Brand Attributes and Core Competencies. It's not meant to be gimmicky, but rather a way for anyone to create a sustainable brand for themselves – something authentic and personal and that makes sense for your resources and ideas. Once you have that sort of mapped out, hopefully some "branding magic" starts to happen. Well, a Value Proposition and a Mission Statement are part of that magic, and they serve to further guide you forward in an actionable and productive way. (This is also something sponsors/investors love to see!)

2. TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE: VALUE PROPOSITIONS / MISSION STATEMENTS AND HOW TO USE THEM

You may be asking, "what the H-E-double-hockey-sticks is a 'Value Proposition?" And I can't say I blame you. This sounds like something out of a self-help book, but go with me on this. To put it simply, a Value Proposition is a short statement of benefit outlining something specific that a brand consumer/customer receives if they — through investment of either time or money — buy into a brand. A Value Prop should be used as a cornerstone for developing a brand identity, and likewise it can be used as a compass to guide any and all resulting design or business decisions. It can also help to ensure that anyone involved with the brand understands its core values — it's a constant reminder of who you are and the purpose you serve. And because I'm about walking the walk as much as talking the talk, I offer you a little (fun) guide to writing one:

Mission Statements. Now here's where we can get (literally) ambitious. The brand Mission Statement is just that: the reason your brand exists, and the mission that made you get started with it in the first place. While your Value Proposition is private for you and your team, the Mission Statement — though similar — should be posted for the benefit of potential brand consumers/customers. If you're still unsure about this, take a look around some of your favorite websites. You'll usually find a Mission Statement of sorts in the "about" section. (Mine is over there on the right. It could use some work.) Some examples:

Are you surprised by any of these? I am. Gap's mission is not to make the perfect t-shirt, or dress the world in swingin' khakis. Nope, it's to create (what is essentially) an addictive consumer experience. The product and its marketing are just contributing factors of that larger goal to take over the world with neon legging jeans. Ahh! (Kidding.)

I would expect Apple's mission to wax emotional about customer experience simply because they are truly the masters in this regard. But their exclusive mission is to be THE category leaders for product innovation. Inversely to Gap, their consumer experience is the most adaptive part of their brand. Getting their "innovative" products delivered to the public in an impactful, disruptive way can only work if their products are, in fact, disruptive. (I mean, let's recall their first ever 1984-style TV ad.) The mission starts there.

And let's not forget to look at a non-retail organization. I picked the Levo League. (If you're not familiar, you should be.) You might stumble across their website and think: "Their goal is to provide information to people. That's cool." But their mission statement communicates something else. Their goal is to create an active, symbiotic community of professionals. They have leveraged this mission and their core values to design an online environment that facilitates and encourages active knowledge sharing. Their website/videos/workshops are the carefully considered and designed tools. The living network is the result. Mission being accomplished!

But Sarah, what does this mean for bloggers and small businesses? It means... Think longer and think harder about what you're doing. Think about the value you can bring to the larger community. Make maintaining that value your mission. Let all of the little details (your visual identity, your blog's aesthetic, language, attitude, Instagrams, whatever) be the stepping stones that guide a user through your brand's experience so that they, too can understand your mission and live it with you. And finally...

3. AS A RULE (NOT A REACTION) EMBRACE CHANGE AS A CONSTANT

Value Propositions and Mission Statements are not intended to be set in stone. Economies change. Technologies change. Markets change. Customers change. I think the blog world itself is a great example of how tumultuous any customer/consumer-centric environment can be (re: this post). So, my final piece of branding advice is simple: Schedule time to revisit your own ideas. Reflect. Reevaluate. Update or edit. Adjust your direction accordingly. Just make sure you never lose sight of what will always matter most: Your strengths and your ambitions. They are yours. No one else has them. They will guide you.

Feb 25, 2013

This is a topic I know really, really well... she says semi-confidently while staring down the barrel of actually committing to sharing her innermost thoughts on a gigantic topic. No big deal? Really big deal. So big I can't fit it into one blog post. Instead, I'll just start with my love letter to the online community and why branding for us means something entirely unique. And because I'm a huge nerd, I'm using some nerdy technical terms. Please don't hate me because of it. If you feel the need to roll your eyes, I completely understand. I roll my eyes at myself all the time...

It should go without saying that I definitely do not know everything there is to know about branding, but I can tell you what I have learned from my professional experience and from my time at SCAD. This should make you smile: Even the multi-billion dollar corporations we worked with in sponsored classes struggle with branding and especially with adjusting to change. And this, my friends, THIS is why I have always had enormous respect for bloggers and smaller companies who manage to nail the process. We bootstrap while they sit through PowerPoint after PowerPoint presentation. And we all know why, right?

Our medium is our strength. Our medium is a community. It's alive. It's active. It's social. It's amazing. Above many other industries, we are some of the most obsessively connected professionals. We are able to find, know and understand like-minded people at an unprecedented scale, connecting through common emotions, their behaviors, and their opinions. We process and consume this information every day through Instagrams, Tweets, Facebook "likes", and (sometimes) blog posts. Some of it is more, shall we say, "composed" {::cough:: staged ::cough::) than others? But for the most part, these little offerings of personal moments allow us to know each other and/or the brand we represent.

For all of our strengths, we also have weaknesses. Being a part of a community can make it difficult to really recognize or understand (contextualize) our place in the community as an entity. Sometimes we survive on behavior that helps us to simply co-exist, rather than to innovate, serve or influence. This is why some ideas are duplicated and content can become generic or borderline soulless (that was another blog post entirely). But strong branding has heart and guts – it represents a clear purpose, and as such, it is relatable and addicting. While a great brand comfortably co-exists, it also leverages its strengths to lead. And all that starts with a firm idea of what/who you are, the purpose your work serves, and how that translates to the surrounding community.

Figure out where you stand. The next time you're browsing around on Instagram, your Google Reader or your Twitter feed, bypass the pretty and instead think about the pure data you have on your hands for a hot minute. Massive companies pay consultants thousands of dollars on focus groups and surveys to tell them whether or not their brand is viable or if their product will sell. A lot of them are turning to algorithms that troll Twitter and Facebook for keywords used to map our communication activity (I took a class in this, too. It's truly soul-sucking.) They're looking for information on the memorability, distinctiveness and relevance of their products and marketing efforts.

Does this sound like a familiar concept to you? It should, because as bloggers and blog readers, we have all of this activity going on around us all the time. But we aren't computers and we aren't coming at this from the other end of a spreadsheet. We live it. We understand the qualitative value of context and community. We have taught ourselves to read the signs better than anyone. And after that long-winded introduction, this is Part 1 of my branding advice...

Last week I rambled about the importance of "being yourself" as the catalyst for building a community, and hopefully you can see why this applies for personal branding as well. To create a strong brand, you must seek and leverage your personal points of differentiation. In branding jargon, these are simply referred to as core competencies – the things you are best at, and brand attributes – literally the words that best describe what your brand is all about. The intersection of these two things (strengths and aspirations) is where the branding magic happens.

If you don't know your core competencies or brand attributes already, or if you're looking to build a brand from the ground up, I recommend taking advantage of our resources (social media included) to look for patterns: What are people doing? What are they sharing? What are they excited about? What are they complaining about? What surprises delight them? Even better: What are you doing? What are you excited about? What are you complaining about? What surprises delight you? Write it all down. Draw a mind map. Make a big list on a piece of big paper. Stick Post-Its all over that list. Make it messy. Messy thinking is a lot of fun and usually more productive anyway...

Out of the mess (my mess being 4 years of blogging), you will find specific combinations of competencies and attributes that make your role in the larger community special, like a fingerprint. Your personal brand (or your business's brand) should grow out of these reference points. Likewise, you can use them as a metric for success for anything that you do. This is especially nerve-racking to share, but.... Here are mine:

Still to come next week...

2. TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE: VALUE PROPOSITIONS / MISSION STATEMENTS AND HOW TO USE THEM

3. AS A RULE (NOT A REACTION) EMBRACE CHANGE AS A CONSTANT

(Why the Shakespeare? I'm not sure. Clearly one of my other core competencies is being weird.) So... What do we think? Are you hating this? Is it helpful? Let me know! And I would love to see other bloggers take a chance and share their competencies and attributes. If you are inclined to do so, please share the link in the comments!